Parallel NFS

NFS is pretty old file sharing technology for UNIX based system and storage systems. However, it suffers from performance issues. NFSv4.1 address data access issues by adding a new feature called parallel NFS (pNFS) – a method of introducing Data Access Parallelism. The end result is ultra fast file sharing for clusters and high availability configurations.

The Network File System (NFS) is a stalwart component of most modern local area networks (LANs). But NFS is inadequate for the demanding input- and output-intensive applications commonly found in high-performance computing — or, at least it was. The newest revision of the NFS standard includes Parallel NFS (pNFS), a parallelized implementation of file sharing that multiplies transfer rates by orders of magnitude.